new commercial model
Have you tried shaking kids down for there dinner money at the school gate that's a commercial model that works. I guess your screw now that the world has caught on to the in game payment scams you've been running.
Moshi Monsters' daddy Mind Candy: Falling sales, £2.2m loss...
Profits at Shoreditch darling Mandy Candy plunged into the red in 2013, with the company recording a £2.2m loss for the full-year 2013, compared with profits of £8m for 2012. During the same period revenue at the company - which has brought the world kiddy virtual-playland Moshi Monsters - fell by more than one-third to £22. …
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Friday 14th November 2014 13:01 GMT DrXym
Re: new commercial model
Moshi Monsters isn't a scam. It's a fair and transparent transaction - you pay a fixed fee and you get to play for a fixed duration, e.g. €5 for a month. Playing meant doing what you wanted - decorating your house, planting seeds, caring for your monster, going on quests, making friends. You could even play without a sub but some of the features were locked off.
The one serious objection I could raise about Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin is if you pay for a month then they set it to automatically renew which is intensely annoying.
But these days is that kids have moved on from computers to tablets and from subscription services to freemium "games". And most of these are lame farmville style efforts where you have to build a zoo, or a dinosaur park, or a monster jungle, or a village of some kind. And these ARE scams. They are not games, they're skinner boxes designed to hook people to the action/reward cycle and then screw people for cash in order to overcome time barriers.
I have said point blank to the kids that I will not pay a penny on these sorts of games.
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Friday 14th November 2014 10:41 GMT Craig McGill 1
Too late to tablet
Moshi Monsters wasn't a bad idea at launch but it failed at two things:
1) Was too late to adapt to working on tablets and phones. Having to use a desktop or laptop all the time absolutely hammered it. If they had the full service on tablets earlier they would have been doing far better.
2) They failed to adapt to a changing audience. While they always had the younger market sewn up, there was nothing for the early users who grew up. JK Rowling pulled it off with the Potter books but few others have managed it.
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Friday 14th November 2014 11:03 GMT Tim Jenkins
"...nothing for the early users who grew up..."
Yup - both of ours had subscriptions for a while, but now one is surgically attached to her smartphone and the other is on Minecraft (or rather watching other people play Minecraft on YouTube, which is apparently just the same, duh, Dad). Not a word of protest when I cancelled the recurring payments, which, to be fair, Mind Candy does make very easy. Now, if only I could get back those AOL ones...
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Friday 14th November 2014 13:21 GMT 's water music
Re: "...nothing for the early users who grew up..."
Mine watches minecraft videos all the time too ... I dont get it either
yup. They also play MC itself which is dull enough for the most part. I have started to wonder if boredom thresholds are stored as a signed int and at some point on the boring continuum it overflows and flips back to being interesting again.
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Friday 14th November 2014 14:01 GMT DrXym
Re: "...nothing for the early users who grew up..."
"Mine watches minecraft videos all the time too ... I dont get it either"
My eldest does too. There is some guy on YouTube who has done hundreds of these videos and whose voice takes on a particularly twatty annoying quality after listening to it for a while.
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Tuesday 18th November 2014 19:14 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: "...nothing for the early users who grew up..."
Mine watches minecraft videos all the time too ... I dont get it either
When I were a lad, I knew folks1 who would regularly watch television programs like Bassmasters.
That's TV about fishing. Fishing. On the TV. Video of a bunch of guys in waders casting lines and occasionally pulling out a fish, which they'd then toss back in.
Compared to that, Minecraft videos sound positively compelling.
That said, I admit the only person I've seen watch Minecraft videos on Youtube also records her own, generally tutorials on how to use the mods she's written. And she's 10, so she's not as jaded as the typical Reg reader.
1Men. There may be women who do this, but I've never encountered any.
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Friday 14th November 2014 12:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Kids grow up and they hardly ever want to take "toys" from one generation to the next. My daughter was a huge fan of Moshi Monsters when she was about 7 or 8 but she's about to turn 12, she's in Secondary school and, against my best endevours, she's looking towards joining the more adult networks like Snapshat, Facepalm and Instagrab where all her mates are now.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
